


Words are failing him again

by orphan_account



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Asexual Jughead, Drabble, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 18:12:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10392987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "He find words are failing him again." Drabble from season one of the 2017 show Riverdale.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly taking place in Jughead Jones's head, mostly following the television show canon pretty closely. Juggie was always my favourite character, with Betty a close second, and I've always really liked their friendship. 
> 
> Note regarding the Bughead stuff: my personal headcanon with Jughead is that he's asexual but maybe not entirely against the idea of romance without a sexual relationship, but perhaps he hasn't quite figured it out yet. So these drabbles are maybe a certain kind of asexual (but not necessarily aromantic, which I know some people claim Juggie to be) fix-it for the tv show.

He stares at her lips, and then, briefly, before he loses his cool, at her eyes. He’s seen enough movies and he’s read enough books that he knows what to do, even if he doesn’t feel it. Well, he feels something. He’s been hoping for a moment like this. A moment where, as books describe and movies show, all other worries and distractions and concerns melt away, and there’s just her lips, and his, and maybe something happens. So he can’t make the words happen. Maybe he’ll never have the words, but it feels like when he was eight and Archie dared him to jump off a cliff into the rushing river in summer—he takes a moment before a running start and then: a leap. Maybe something will happen.

What’s a kiss supposed to feel like? Nothing like fireworks. He doesn’t feel much other than her soft, un-chapped lips. They are softer than he was expecting—much softer. And she smells nice, even up close where the smell of her conditioner is stronger, but it’s not sickeningly sweet, at least not at the moment. He made sure to close his eyes, and even with closed eyes he feels her smiling and that’s when his heart makes a little jump, the smallest of stutters. That’s something.

He thinks about that kiss a lot. It's his first, and he thinks it's a pretty good one. It would make for a good story, and he tries to write about it, he keeps finding himself trying to find reasons to write about it, but he doesn't know how and he ends up deleting every attempt. Maybe it's just for him. Maybe it's just for him and Betty.

And then it's only a few days later when he find words are failing him again.

“Hey, you didn’t have to walk me home.” Betty says, tightening her grip on his hand ever so slightly. They’ve held hands since they left the Catholic Church near the Evergreen woods, ever since Jughead slowly tugged her away from the shocked crowd and her impossible parents. And he rather likes this, walking in the rain with her. She’s a bit shell-shocked and pensive, but even her troubled silence doesn’t faze him. She’s still one of the most friendly people he knows, and their joined fingers put something in him at ease, something he hasn’t felt since his mother took Jelly Bean and got out of town.

“Uh, there’s a killer on the loose, remember?” He says. He almost doesn’t continue, but finds his brain catching up with his runaway mouth. “Besides, isn’t this what…you know…what people like us, who’ve gone through what we’ve gone through, do?”

He doesn’t use the word boyfriend. He can’t use the word boyfriend. He’s pretty sure, like ninety-nine point nine percent sure, that it’s not out of some misguided impulse to resist commitment or out of a fear that defining a relationship too early will ruin it. It’s the term itself that unnerves him. “Boyfriend.” It reminds him of his father, drunk and passed out, or unshaven with bleary, red eyes. It reminds him of the look on Jelly Bean’s face when their father threw a glass bottle against a wall, shattering it. It reminds him of his father telling Archie’s dad that Jughead would never be interested in football, would never be into that stuff. It’s a stupid word. He doesn’t feel like a boy, these days. Can you still be a kid when your dad is a drunk criminal and you’re technically homeless? He’s not a _boy_. He resents the term boyfriend. Oh, he definitely resents it.

But he likes holding her hand. Then Jughead notices her crestfallen face, and he realizes that Betty’s mind is a million miles away. And he thinks of Jelly Bean, safe and up north and away from all the shit that’s happening in Riverdale, and he knows that for all the good or bad that walking through the Evergreen woods all day did, they still have no idea where Polly is, and he’s pretty worried too. Not just for Betty, and for Polly, but for all of them Riverdale teenagers. For all that this murder is doing to this town. And so he relishes his hold on Betty Cooper's hand, and doesn't want to let go. 


End file.
